Steve Holden's letter on donations for the server project

On 17 April 2011,
Steve Holden
posted the letter below to the
(main) PSF
mailing list (itself visible only to
members).
While Phaseit won't donate money
directly for this particular project, it encourages others to do so,
and provides this Web page to spread the news about the possibility.
With Steve's permission, Phaseit publishes here a copy
(edited slightly for format):

The Python Software Foundation continues its work to promote the
development and adoption of the language. As a result of feedback from
the CPython, PyPy, Jython and IronPython development teams at the recent
PyCon Language Summit a director has proposed that we purchase servers
to be hosted at OSU/OSL (where the ASF and the Linux kernel team servers
are hosted along with those of many other open source project). Such
hardware will serve the principal purpose of establishing sensible
benchmarks that can be adopted by all implementation teams. The PyPy
team already provide some useful information at http://speed.pypy.org,
and it would be good to have similar information from the other
implementations in a readily comparable form.
This is important because (among other reasons) we need to be able to
inform people about Python performance across multiple implementations.
If people can tell which implementation will best meet their specific
needs there is a better chance that they will adopt Python. We hope it
will also send a message that the Python Software Foundation sees all
implementations as deserving of support: we are /not/ just the "CPython
Software Foundation".
Further, we hope that by making Python performance figures more
available and accessible we will be able to assist Python developers in
making sure that changes do not adversely affect the speed of their
implementation, making it less likely that new releases will impose
performance penalties on early adopters, and thereby speeding adoption
of new releases.
The cost of the first benchmark machine is a little less than US $4,000,
and we intend to go ahead with the purchase as soon as practically
possible (although we are also looking for donated hardware). Given that
the Foundation is a non-profit we would really much rather spend
additional donation on this than dip into the treasury, and as this is
only one example of a hardware purchase that will benefit the Python
community at large we have decided to establish a hardware fund to
receive donations, with an initial target of $20,000.
I believe this is the first time the Foundation has issued a public call
for funding: I feel it is now reasonable to do so thanks to the hard
work of the Board and Officers over the past eighteen months. If you or
your organization would like to help the Foundation by donating to the
hardware fund, please contact psf@python.org for more information.
Steve Holden
steve@holdenweb.com